Friday, July 25, 2008

Africa and the ICC

The prosecutor of the ICC has encouraged self-referrals, and the only suchreferrals have been from African countries. While the ICC has received some1,700 communications to investigate alleged crimes in 139 countries, 80 percentof these communications have been found outside the jurisdiction of the court.This is "not a question of picking on Africa," says John Washburn (PDF) of the American NGO Coalition for the ICC. "The UN Security Council referred [Darfur], and the other countries came forward voluntarily." Some international law experts say the weakness of Africa's national legal systems has led individual countries to refer situations to the ICC. Most African states have yet to implement the Rome Statutes in their domestic legislation, write Olympia Bekou and Sangeeta Shah inHuman Rights Law Review, which is the first step toward retaining domesticjurisdiction. "Strengthening domestic prosecutions so that the ICC does not haveto intervene should be the ultimate goal of every state," they write.